hawkeyesports.com, the official world wide web site of the Iowa Hawkeyes powered by McLeodUSA, has been a busy destination during the first month of the 2004-05 athletics year.

As of midnight of Saturday, Sept. 25, more than 4.2 million pages of content has been downloaded by more than 420,00 unique visitors to the site. The previous highwater marks were registed in November 2003 when more than 3.5 million pages were viewed by 222,000 unique visitors.

"Certainly, the start of another athletics year on campus led by interest in our football program are the primary reasons for the tremendous numbers," said Rick Klatt, associate athletics director for external affairs.

As of midnight of Saturday, Sept. 25, more than 4.2 million pages of content has been downloaded by more than 420,00 unique visitors to the site. The previous highwater marks for hawkeyesports.com were registed in November 2004 when more than 3.5 million pages were viewed by 222,000 unique visitors.

"The web is all about content and I believe the staff responsible for the content on hawkeyesports.com -- and there are many who deserve lots of credit -- have done an outstanding job of providing new, interesting content for visitors to the site to enjoy."

Klatt said the site is on pace to end the month with more than 4.7 million pages viewed by more than 450,000 unique visitors. He also believes there's room for even more growth.

"I'm optimistic we will continue to see a steady increase in traffic as a result of the ongoing interest in our football program both from our fans and fans of our opponents, the renovation of Kinnick Stadium, the potential for success in volleyball and the start of another winter sports season. Also, there's no doubt that success means traffic and I think our coaches across the board have their programs poised for a great deal of success," Klatt said.

"I'm also excited about the content that is being offered in the multimedia area of the site. It's simply outstanding," he added.

Klatt said the UI is currently working with its web partner, College Sports Television, to provide live audio and video of the weekly media conferences staged for Kirk Ferentz, Steve Alford and Lisa Bluder.

"It's a high priority and one that I'd really like to see us achieve sometime in October. The web is all about content and particularly exclusive, timely content. That content would be both," he said.

Klatt said the live coverage of the media conferences is similar to the development of the archive areas for each program that was completed during the summer months.

"We have a list a mile long of things we'd like to be able to do with the web site. It's not perfect and it's not complete, however, I think we're doing a pretty good job considering the limited new resources we've been able to apply against the web," Klatt said.

"It's here to stay, it's powerful and, based on the numbers in September, we're doing a pretty good job. Not the perfect job or the best job, but a pretty good job nonetheless," he said.

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